I've been re-reading Baym's essay on "The Emergence of On-line Community" (1998) and she helpfully breaks down, in a methdologically useful way, some of the key factors that allow online communities to be stable (and therefore significant). I would propose that questions of online community owe and important debt to the sociologists and anthropologists of the classical era. I think the classical question of the relationship between religion and society is absolutely apropos of internet research that is approached from the point of view of communication and sociology. In "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" (1912) Durkheim held that "it is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power it has over them". He further argued that "collective sentiments can just as well become incarnate in persons or formulae: some formulae are flags, while there are persons, either real or mythical, who are symbols." The study of societies is the study of that which people attribute a 'sacred' quality to and how they do this and why they do it in certain circumstances rather than other 'profane' or ordinary circumstances. A key research question (for me at least) would then be, what rituals, practices, emblems, and symbols, in each case of online activity, form a set of 'sacred' conditions that acts as a centre which they then imagine as the basic feature of their community? (BTW, just in case anyone takes me for a conservative, I would add that the sacred is always the most important and essential opening for the contestation of a society, and indeed, without the sense of social seriousness it brings there would be little reason to contest or resist anything.) ______________________________ Dr. David Toews, PhD Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology University of Windsor, Canada If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: "What is a question?" - Wittgenstein